The second chapter in one of the most loved and respected Japanese shooting game series ever: The Tale of ALLTYNEX by Japanese indie developer SITER SKAIN. Carefully crafted play experiences, destructive fun, and absorbing gameplay have made the ALLTYNEX trilogy renowned in shooting game communities.

Recommended By Curators

About This Game

The second chapter in one of the most loved and respected Japanese shooting game series ever: The Tale of ALLTYNEX by Japanese indie developer SITER SKAIN. Carefully crafted play experiences, destructive fun, and absorbing gameplay have made the ALLTYNEX trilogy renowned in shmup / shooting game communities, both in Japan and overseas.

StoryMany years have passed since the ALLTYNEX incident and humanity’s resettlement of the Earth. The world’s nations have joined to form a unified economy and a global militaristic government. However, in opposition to the worldwide mass oppression, a resistance organization arose: Valkyness.The decades long conflict between the Global Unified Army and Valkyness is suddenly interrupted when an alien force arrives seeking vengeance on humanity for atrocities inflicted upon their people.Earth's war against the Raiwat leads to a surprising ending that reduces almost the entire planet to scorched earth, brings mankind to the verge of extinction and sows the seeds of the events to follow in KAMUI.

Features

8 stages of action and massive boss battles!

Use the reflective shield system mechanic for perfect defense or to powerfully reflect enemy attacks!

Carefully crafted dramatic developments to match the in-game story progress!

Take on a diverse roster of enemies: from the Global Unified Army forces to the Raiwat invaders and their apocalyptic living devices!

Features Arcade, Training and unlockable Soundtrack mode!

Steam Trading Cards

Coming to Steam soon: The other two installments to The Tale of ALLTYNEX trilogy, KAMUI and ALLTYNEX Second!

Graphics are similar to the 16-bit era, rather simplistic but still appealing.

The music is, like a lot of BH games, highly addictive. Personally, I feel that Angel Dust (Entropy battle) and Air (Stage 6) are the best in game, though The Scorpions Poison (Scorpio Battle) is a close runner up.

This game may not have the best graphics "amimations are a little choppy" but the gameplay, music and controlls are outstanding. The game is pretty hard and I only recommend to fans verticle shoters because you need quite abit of skill to progress in this game. This game is simmular to the old turbo graphixs shoters and arcade shoter. I give it a 8/10 must buy!

FANTASTIC vertical shmup with an instrinsically satisfying gimmick: Your button that isn't "shoot" reflects projectiles and laser beams allowing you to focus on combat rather than power-up collection. Great graphics and mesmermizing Mode 7-esque sprite rotation sucks you in as you respond to manic bullet threats from all sides and all dimensions. I much prefer horizontal shmups but this one grips me like few shooters can. I can't really compare it to anything properly but it definitely brings me back to playing Truxton on the Mega Drive or 1942 in the arcade.

A fantastic top-down shooter.In RefleX your goal is to shoot down all the enemy ships while not being shot down yourself.You are aided by a shield, which reflects enemy bullets and shooting enemies down with reflected bullets awards double the points.Their is a catch though as the shield can only be used for a limited time before needing to be recharged and you cannot shoot while you are emitting your shield.

Reminincent of a certain other top down shooter, you spend a lot of time dodging very narrow gaps between enemy bullets and reflecting (homing) shots back at the enemy. Simple yet intuitive and a lot of fun!If you like top down shooters you will enjoy this.

The sound effects are sufficient and the music is great.If you aren't into bullet hell games but enjoy shooting things and making explosions then this game is for you (as well as Broforce, I suppose).

I played Alltynex before playing Reflex, so at the begining it was hard to get used to clearly worse graphics. It took me a bit to get involved in the game, but once I have played a while I am really enjoying the game, even more than Alltynex. Proper difficulty level, smart use of the reflex, big bosses, some Ikaruga like enemies, make reflex a great shoot em up. I strongly recommend it.

Once I've beaten it, I recommend it even more. In the top ten of shoot em ups.

Long Answer: I picked up this game last year from Nyu Media's website, and I'm glad it finally made it to Steam. Yeah, I've got a few buddies I'm going to corrupt with some Alltynex goodness.

There's a great sense of design behind this game. From the way the levels flow into each other, to the progression of escalating boss fights, everything looks in place.

Even the unique bullet colors have consistent meanings; some can be absorbed, some can be reflected, and some can be shot down. Knowing when to shoot, when to reflect, and when to just let off the fire button and recharge, is the key to victory.

The scoring system comes naturally. Use the reflect feature well, and get big multipliers. It's great fun sending off a mass of reflected bullets and homing lasers, followed by some giant x64 kills. Or for those who just want to play to the end and enjoy the spectacle, continues are awarded on a regular basis to aid progress.

Finally the renowned doujin Shoot'em up trilogy "The Tale of ALLTYNEX" is getting released on Steam. Starting with RefleX the second game in the series.

Gameplay:Polished and intuitive, the key mechanic of the game is your ships relfecting shield. When activated the shield reflects bullets, but your ships energy is drained fast and when it gets low enough the shield stops working and even your weapons get weaker. So using the reflector-shield requires timing and strategy, mastering the game requires a lot of pattern recognition, good timing and knowing when to use the shield.

Graphics:Looks basically like an Arcade game from the early 90's. But with some modern effects like lensflares and transparencies. It's pretty good looking for a low resolution 2D game, but the animation is somewhat lacking. The explotions and lazer effects look however satisfying.

Overall:Impressive for a Doujin game, this could have passed as an professionally produced Arcade game in the 90's. I would recommend this game for any veteran fans of the Shoot'em up genre, the gameplay and music is top notch. But the graphics do look dated, and it is a shame that the developer did not allow making modifications to the game, so it is missing Steam achievements and leaderboards. Also the game lacks configuration options in-game, you have to find the config executable in the steamapps/common/RefleX directory.

For people completely new to the genre, out of the games available on Steam I still recommend starting out with Ikaruga. The only reason being it looks modern and has a great well polished PC port with full Steam features. However RefleX is likely more fun and easier to grasp than Ikaruga for beginners, but not everyone will accept the dated look.

Okay, so this, along with the rest of the Tale of ALLTYNEX trilogy, is widely regarded in shmup circles as one of the best doujin (Japanese indie) shmups ever, and it really is very good. The gameplay revolves around your ability to produce a reflective shield, similar to Giga Wing. If you kill an enemy with a reflected bullet, you get a score multiplier for a little while. If you continue killing enemies with reflected bullets while the multiplier is still active, it goes even higher, to a maximum of x64. You can't just keep the shield on all the time, though, as you have a limited amount of energy for it, which recharges while you aren't using it, and does so more quickly if you aren't shooting. Speaking of shooting, your firepower is tied directly to how much shield energy you have left. As an aside, you don't get a traditional lives system in this game. Instead, you have a health gauge which is fully repaired at certain points. Whether or not you will prefer this to a traditional lives system is subjective.

As for the presentation, the music, graphics, and story are top-notch. I have nothing more to add there. My only real complaint here is that this version of RefleX doesn't have the Steam overlay (even though ALLTYNEX Second and Kamui will), so you'll need something like Puush if, say, you want to take a screenshot of your personal best score. There are also no online leaderboards (also something the other two games in the trilogy will have). Overall, though, if you haven't bought this yet, go ahead and do so. It's awesome.

There are a lot of bad 2D shmups on Steam. This isn't one of them. In fact, it's pretty dang good. If this had came out on the PS1 or Saturn, it'd have been a big deal, and that's a high compliment.

Straightforward controls. Straightforward mechanics.. Shield bounces back bullets, which is the key mechanic. Old school pixel graphics. Old school rock solid collision detection. Old school bullet overload.

***Nyu-Media is back with one of the finest Doujin shooting titles Steam has ever seen! RefleX is the second part of the Tale of Alltynex Series from renowned Doujin group Siter Skain and offers slick shooting goodness with simple gameplay and scoring mechanics. But how does it stack up?***

Fairly decent shoot-em-up with an interesting shield mechanic (absorbs some shots while reflecting others) and scoring system. Like any shoot-em-up of this nature, it's very challenging, but still fun for a while. Recommend using a controller for this game.

- Solid mechanics. The reflect shield can be used not only to reflect to block/reflect shots but to continue combos further than normal (hint - you can reflect a homing laser you reflected alread- Sprites are good.- Not too hard, nor too easy either. Perfect scale of difficalty.- The zodiacs (HUGE constructs powered by god like power cores) are pretty boss as enemies.

Cons

- Parts of the story is explained in the pdf manual. This can lead players in the dark story wise if they rely on the game itself to tell the story.

Made by reknowned doujin circle Siter Skain, RefleX is generally considered to be the best out of the Alltynex Trilogy of doujin shoot-'em-ups, with the other two gmaes in the series being Kamui and Alltynex 2nd. RefleX features a shield system where your ship can activate an impenetrable shield that not only protects you from enemy fire, but also redirects certain enemy fire back to the enemies! However, energy for the shield is strictly limited, and can only be replenished quickly by not shooting. As such, the game demands that you know when and when not to shoot, shield, and send lasers back, and that demands practice.

Thankfully, the game gives you extra continues whenever you get a game over, so you will eventually see the end screen if you persevere. However, we all know that that's not how shmups are meant to be played - and the game will only record your high score if you don't continue, in line with that "one credit completion" mentality. So practice, persevere, go beyond your limits and post that 1CC hi-score for all to see!

Amazing shmup! The excellent visuals, music and enemy designs will lure you in, the intense action will keep you playing. While the patterns are a bit too bullethellish for my taste it ultimately didn't matter - RefleX is an excellent effort and possibly my favourite shmup on Steam right now. The reflect-system that is in place provides a nice dynamic between firing your lasers and avoiding bullets to recharge as well as using reflected shots to score the big points.

I gotta say: I love Stage 3 - it stands out the most for me. It is a massive space battle among many capital ships - it is so epic! Gigantic lasers and all. And it reminds me nicely of one of my favourite shmups ever (Raystorm). In fact, the storyline told pretty much exclusively through gameplay is what kept me going - the game just goes completely bonkers towards the end.

It's the kind of grandeur and scale that only japanese arcade games could provide for the longest time - and RefleX is a nice throwback to the old days of screenfilling bosses, massive explosions and destruction on a global scale and it does so without any waifu-fanservice (which is a big plus in my book).

It should provide plenty of challenge for the casual shmup-player (me!) as well as the truly hardcore who have to 1CC everything. Can't wait for the next games in this series and would highly recommend you give this game a try.